Blogging from the International Astronomical Union Meeting, Prague, August 14 to 25, 2006

Monday, August 21, 2006

J. Hearnshaw: A survey of published astronomical outputs of countries 1976-2005

I could not resist to return to the meeting anyway before I fly back to Sweden tonight. I was tempted by the Session about the "Virtual Observatory", but I guess one can find out about that on the web anyway.

Therefore, I am sitting in the Special Session 5 on "Astronomy for the Developing World" right now. I only got the last minutes of J. Heranshaws talk, but the summary contained the following:- There are 1.39 astronomers per million population over the world.- There are 9000 members in the IAU.- The majority of papers is published by IAU members.- 112 countries have no IAU members, but 3/4 of the world's population live in IAU member-countries.- The GDP of a country correlates with the number of it's IAU members.- It also correlates with the number of papers published.- Since 2001, there has been a rapid increase in multi-national papers and large collaborations.